What would Yuri Gagarin have thought? 21st century spacemen

What would Yuri Gagarin have thought? 21st century spacemen

We've come a long way in the 50 years since Yuri Gagarin became the first man to travel into space. We've put a man on the moon, sent probes and rovers to the planets, established an orbiting outpost and looked deep into the universe. This is our pick of the best space and astronomy images from the past month

Tuesday 12 April 2011 13.30 EDT
First published on Tuesday 12 April 2011 13.30 EDT

Esa astronaut Paolo Nespoli working with the Light Microscopy Module in the Destiny laboratory of the International Space Station on 8 March. Nespoli
filmed the Earth from the ISS for the film
First Orbit, marking the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's pioneering space flight

The cramped interior of a Russian Soyuz capsule after landing in Arkalyk, Kazakhstan, on 16 March. The Soyuz will soon be the only way to get to and from the International Space StationPhotograph: Sergei Remezov/AFP

The men who fell to Earth: Flight engineer Oleg Skripochka, left, flight engineer Alexander Kaleri, centre, and Commander Scott Kelly, sit outside the capsule minutes after they landed. They had spent almost six months onboard the International Space Station

How the Earth would look if it were distorted to make gravity equal at every point on its surface. Data from
Esa's GOCE mission will be used to improve our understanding of the Earth's geology, sea level changes and the distribution of ice. Blue represents low gravitational values and the reds/yellows represent high valuesPhotograph: Esa

Nasa's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (Wise) captured
this image of the star Alpha Camelopardalis, or Alpha Cam. The red arc is a bow shock, similar to the wake in front of the bow of a ship in water

The Tycho supernova remnant, produced by the explosion of a white dwarf star in our galaxy. Low-energy X-rays (red) show debris expanding outwards from the supernova explosion and high-energy X-rays (blue) show the blast wave - a shell of extremely energetic electronsPhotograph: Rutgers/K.Eriksen et al/CXC/Nasa

The craggy craters of Saturn's icy moon Rhea. Cassini was about 200 kilometres from Rhea's surface when
the image was taken. The bright spot on the right is probably an artefact caused by a cosmic ray striking the probe's wide-angle camera